I had (not took, we can't choose most of our classes in Indian Engineering / Otherwise almost every other college(s)) one C programming language class in my first semester, and that unfortunately was taught by a contract teacher, I/we didn't like very much [Apologies for this] mainly because he wished to make us punish more for the things that we couldn't answer, than to teach us to make us learn.
I had no idea about where would I be going until a year back, when I grabbed the only college campus placement that I had. It was a very decent placement. Junior Web Developer, salary to afford basic things, stable internet.
6 months was training, for the people who didn't have any background in programming / Computer Science before. There was so much resistance, and pressure, it was hard to learn how to code, and more so learn the optimisations, and work arounds of tricky problems, and bugs! I give up multiple times. But I didn't know what I'd do if not, not give up on this, so I kept coming back, pushing myself.
There's so much to learn, and the edge just keeps expanding to new horizons every single day. It's intimidating. It's more intimidating than the expansion of the universe because, that's not very visible / noticeable there. The other day, I started reading Addy Osmani's React + PWA series, and I stopped after the second, it was too much to grasp all at once, without actually coding along.
I regret having thrown 4 years of my college not learning how to program, although I was intrigued by it. I'd picked up processing programming language, and tried to do some out of the world font magic for the college magazine, which I was the editor of, but I couldn't (read didn't)
I'm 22, started coding at 21. I've always had a need to have a mentor, still do, desperately. But there is no, not trying, anymore. Whenever I've an idea, I just stick on it, no matter, how long it takes for me to understand and execute. Starting with small things, and turning their activity into habits does the trick I guess, more than any amount of inspiration and motivation.
#RantOver